Revitalizing the Eschewed Nexus: Pandemics, Public Health and National Security

Abstract

The history of human race holds copious stories of outbreak of pandemics and infectious diseases. The impacts of diseases, strategies and responses and the way forward in post pandemic era grabbing the attention of scholarly community across different disciplines is not new too. Unsurprisingly, amid recent wave of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), public health and health security are the buzz words in leaders’ speeches, the media and scholarship. Despite the growing appreciation of plethora of threats posed by pandemics in a highly globalized and interdependent world, the concept of national security, pertaining to its scope and meaning, is wanting in precision. The paper makes a case for the need to appreciate health-national security interactions in intellectual and policy-making world by drawing upon two major arguments; firstly, health is an essential stabilizing factor for state that overlaps and interacts with military, economic and traditional components of security and secondly, state stands out for being the most effective governance structure to prevent diseases and to carry out an effective response to health crisis. Generation of narratives and lexicons, therefore, need not to be completely outside the master’s house of traditional IR thinking to fully comprehend the nature and sources of insecurity. The paper concludes that an intellectual pathway responsive and accommodative to these interconnected and overlapping sources of (in)securities is needed to guide policy makers to ensure the security of nations in a changing world.